


Long Way Back (I'll Take the Suffering)

by phoenix_in_winter



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Disordered Eating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 00:37:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16505798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phoenix_in_winter/pseuds/phoenix_in_winter
Summary: Murphy’s eyes blaze and Bellamy knows that if he were strong enough to stand, Murphy would be coming at him like a wounded bear. But he’s not, and he’s not, and he’s got blood smeared across his cheek. Bellamy takes a breath. The wordsI choose Murphyare bitter on his tongue.Set between Seasons 4 and 5, on the Ring.





	Long Way Back (I'll Take the Suffering)

**Author's Note:**

> _These stuttering emotions keep me fixed to fall apart..._  
>  \- Coheed and Cambria, “Unheavenly Creatures”

There’s blood dripping from Murphy’s lower lip. Bellamy can’t tell if it came from his mouth or his lungs.

“Fucking hell, Murphy.”

Murphy starts at the sound of his voice, and that’s worse than the way he’s been coughing-gagging-gasping for air; John Murphy is nothing if not a paranoid bastard and Bellamy getting all the way into his quarters undetected is wrong, wrong, wrong.

He has this flash of another lifetime: Murphy beaten and burning and heaving blood, Trojan horse and patient zero in the Grounder bioterror attack. There’s an elevator-drop of dread in his stomach, but this is a closed system. No new germs for years. So it’s either something dormant and flaring, or it’s psychosomatic, or self-inflicted, or autoimmune. Maybe Murphy’s body is trying to eating itself alive. It’s certainly not getting enough calories from the algae soup he keeps turning away.

Murphy’s dropped against the far wall. Knees to chest. Bellamy edges his way in. “Don’t bite me.” He’s only half-joking.

“That’s me.” Murphy’s caustic even when he’s hurt. “Rabid space zombie. A danger to myself and others.”

Bellamy’s still holding the bowl of algae soup. Whatever Monty’s been doing to it lately has not improved the taste, but between their relic of a space station and the literal scorched earth below, he’s not really in a position to complain. And it hasn’t put anyone in a coma lately, so.

He sets the bowl on the table, eyes still fixed on Murphy. He waits for the next wave of coughing to knock him down _(waves: swells in the ocean; power-salt-sand-seaweed pulling you down; up here, they’re nothing but abstractions, flat like the seas always look from this height)_ , then closes the distance between them in two striding steps. Drops to one knee. Gets a palm on Murphy’s forehead, fingers in his hair. He’s slick with sweat, but Bellamy’s pretty sure it’s not the kind of fever that’s dangerous on its own.

He tries to be subtle when he wipes the sweat off his hand onto his pants leg, but apparently he doesn’t succeed.

“’S hard work to look this good.” Something like a smirk on his bloody lips. Grey skin, all-but-closed eyes, head back against the wall.

“Murphy…” He can’t stop the word, or the tone: exhausted disapproval and more pity than either of them would like.

Murphy’s eyes blaze and Bellamy knows that if he were strong enough to stand, Murphy would be coming at him like a wounded bear. But he’s not, and he’s not, and he’s got blood smeared across his cheek. Bellamy takes a breath. The words _I choose Murphy_ are bitter on his tongue.

“Your shower still working?”

“Thought we weren’t allowed to take showers.” He stops to cough again. “Waste of resources.”

“Thought you left so you didn’t have to follow the rules.” He doesn’t quite mean it as a taunt.

Murphy’s jaw tightens. He runs a blood-streaked hand through his greasy hair. “Fuck showers.”

“Fuck _you,_ Murphy.” He’s got an arm under Murphy’s. “Up.”

Murphy gags, and spits, and lets himself be dragged to standing. It’s unnervingly easy to haul him to his feet and unnervingly hard to keep him there. The short trip is slow and staggering. Bellamy is excruciatingly aware of their lack of doctors. Clarke…

Clarke. He still braces for the gut-punch of her name, but it’s faded to a dull ache. They’ve lost so many years to the sky. He swallows. Finishes the thought: _Clarke would have at least known where to start._ But they don’t have her, or Abby or Jackson or anyone who knows what the hell they’re doing, so he’s going to have to figure this out himself.

“Okay.” He lets go, carefully. Murphy leans up against the wall in front of the shower stall. It’s tiny, barely wide enough for one person. He still marvels at how big everything was on the ground. So much empty space. Not enough bodies to fill it up. The pre-A.L.I.E. population crisis is still hard for him to wrap his mind around. “Get that blood off. Let’s see what we’re working with.”

Murphy mutters something that definitely ends with “…see my _dick”_ and strips to the skin without shame. The kid’s ribs are showing, and they’re bruised in ways that suggest that either he’s fucked (the word _leukemia_ surfaces in Bellamy’s mind from somewhere in the long Before) or he’s been slamming himself against the walls. Bellamy finds himself praying for self-harm. Forces himself to breathe. Pushes the question down the line.

Harper had cut everyone’s hair early on, after they’d dragged the Ring back into functionality through brute force, once long-term survival seemed a little more within their grasp and they’d settled into a halting routine. Before Murphy was pacing and sullen and desperate. When Harper asked what Murphy wanted her to do with his hair, he’d looked straight at Bellamy: “Whatever the hell you want.” Drawling, pointed, dredging up the Ground in ways that made Bellamy’s heart stutter.

He’d looked damn good when Harper was done, all sharp lines and sharp eyes. Expressive for Emori was a raised eyebrow and the faintest suggestion of a dirty grin, and the two of them had disappeared into their room, slamming the door against Raven’s protest of, _“Just ’cause I know you two are fucking doesn’t mean I need to hear it!”_

Murphy had stopped showing up for barbershop day months ago. His bangs are hanging in his face and the sides are growing in awkwardly in-between. He steps into the shower, then pauses without turning around. “Not a fucking invalid, Bellamy.”

“Mm.” He tries to make it sound non-committal, but he has no intention of going anywhere.

He fully expects the next sound to be the thud of Murphy collapsing under the shower spray, but it doesn’t come. He looks around the living space. Their area— galley, bridge, farm— looks something like home. _(Home: fragmenting memories and tight-chested fear; Unity Days and math lessons and his-sister-his-responsibility small and secret and safe.)_ Murphy’s space looks… temporary. Like he’s living on the surface. His few possessions are scattered around, but they barely make a dent in the industrial nothingness.

“Towel?” Murphy’s grey-green behind pallid skin, but the blood had washed away and Bellamy’s relieved to see that no more has appeared, at least in the last 30 seconds.

“Um—” He hadn’t thought that far ahead.

“Fuck it.” Muttered and breathless. Murphy wrings some of the water out of his hair with his fingers and steps out of the shower, naked, dripping, and shivering; rainbowed bruises stark against his ribs. He gets to the bed before Bellamy can come up with any sort of plan, and pulls off the blanket to wrap himself in. Sits down. Blanches. Lays down. Back to the wall. Watchful eyes. He’d held it together for five whole minutes, and that’s the end of the rope.

“So.” Bellamy’s still standing. Hovering. He looks around and finds a chair. Pulls it up. Sits down. A calculated distance from the bed, from Murphy, from the powder keg of more history and more uncertain future than either of them knows what to do with.

Murphy raises an eyebrow at him and waits.

_So how fucked are you, really?_

“So.” Again. He leans back in the chair. Opens his hands. “You gonna tell me what happened?”

Murphy shrugs. “Passed out.”

Bellamy tips the chair back onto all four legs with a bang. “When?”

Murphy sighs. Closes his eyes. “I dunno. Before you showed up, I guess?”

“Yeah, not making me feel better about this.”

“Probably managed to bite my own tongue, or cheek, or both, or whatever the hell, and I was coughing and it just kept opening back up…” he shudders, just a little, and Bellamy can’t pull his gaze from the dark circles under his eyes, the fever in his bones.

He shakes himself loose. Leans in. “Okay, here’s what’s gonna happen. I’m gonna go get the med kit, and some more food and water and blankets and shit, and you’re not gonna fight me on it.”

“Fuck you.” The right words, but there’s a weakness underneath.

“Maybe later.” He throws a set of maybe-clean clothes toward the bed and stands to leave. “Not so appealing when you’re bleeding from the mouth.”

. . .

He tries to avoid the others, as much as you can on a ship as small as their battered remnants of the Ark, but when he looks up from the drawer of medical supplies, Echo’s standing in the doorway, watching him.

“Murphy’s sick,” he says, because the rest is too much to explain.

“Yeah?” Wary.

“I’m taking care of it.”

Her fingertips graze his temple as he heads back through door. A kiss at his cheekbone. “Yell if you need backup.” She lets her fingertips trail down the line of his jaw. “Good luck.”

. . .

Murphy doesn’t even try to sit up when Bellamy comes back into his room. He’s not naked anymore, though, so— progress.

“Have you been eating?” He knows the answer. Asks anyway. There’s no way to start the process without a fight, so he might as well jump in.

Murphy shrugs, defensive.

“Okay. Well—” he digs through the backpack of supplies. “Pretty much all this shit says you have to, so.” He comes up with a couple bottles of pills that had looked promising when he raided the small remaining med stash. Everything else was on the ground. No one had thought that anyone would be coming back to the sky.

“You got anything other than algae?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Then I’ll take the suffering, thanks.” He turns over to face the wall. Gingerly, on the sides.

Bellamy wants to tell him that he won’t be suffering much longer if he keeps up his current plan, but decides that might sound a little too appealing to someone who seems to live on the razor’s edge between eternal cockroach and vivid death wish. He shakes his head. “Suit yourself.” He sits down at the table. Pulls out a tablet. Brings up _The Odyssey_.

He gets through the first page before Murphy looks back over his shoulder. “The fuck are you doing?”

“Reading. You should try it sometime.”

“Well, piss off and go read on your own side of the Ring.”

“Yeah? And who’s gonna pick your ass up off the floor when you pass out the next time?”

“Not gonna happen.”

They’re edging their way toward a decade of stand-offs, and they both know when to skip to the silence. Bellamy goes back to his book, and Murphy turns back to the wall, and by the time he’s twenty pages in, Murphy’s shoulders are rising and falling in slow, ragged breaths. Bellamy puts his feet up and lets himself relax, just a little, as the adrenaline comes back down.

. . .

Bellamy wakes with a sharp breath, forgetting where he is, and then it all comes back to him at once. He sits up. Stretches. Looks over to Murphy, who’s still asleep. Bellamy can see the tremors in his back through the thin blanket. There’s another in his backpack. He pulls it out, drapes it over Murphy. Fights the urge to call him John. He just looks so goddamn young.

There’s nothing to do for now, so he goes back to the bridge, and stares at the Earth spinning slowly below.

Raven’s teaching Emori about calculating thrust for re-entry. Emori hadn’t exactly had the opportunity to go to school, so there’s a lot of ground to cover, but they’ve got nothing up here but time. She’s shining, a star pupil, and they’re both happier than Bellamy’s seen them in a while.

“Where’ve you been?” Raven; half curious and half accusatory.

He looks at Emori. Back at Raven. Decides not to ruin the mood. “Around.”

“Uh-huh. Well, since you’re here, take a look at what my girl can do.” She points to Emori, who shrugs.

“Well, I guess the advantage of a simulator is that I can’t accidentally send us spinning off into space.”

Raven’s firm. “You got this.”

Emori’s always been tough, but there’s a confidence in her, now; a desire to show off what she’s learned. She’s proud of herself, and the rest of them are proud of her, too. Murphy just doesn’t know how the fuck to show it.

The simulation is projected on the windows, and it looks pretty damn real. They’re coming out of orbit. Heading for Earth. It’s smooth, at first, and then the picture shakes as they hit the atmosphere, more and more violent, a fireball plummeting through the clouds. He finds his heart pounding like it’s the real thing, lungs constricting, tight in his chest, until it all crests: Green lights, blue skies, safe landing, solid ground. Emori grins. Raven whoops. Bellamy realizes he’s blinking back tears. He doesn’t know where home is, anymore, but the scorched soil beneath them had certainly felt like it for a while.

He congratulates Emori, who’s already debriefing with Raven, and tries to slow his heart.

He finds himself in the algae farm without particularly meaning to. Monty’s there, talking to the waterlogged green blooms.

“They ever talk back?”

Monty starts, and recovers. “I’ll let you know if they do.”

He leans back against the door and watches for a while. Monty’s got a rhythm that’s both meditative and efficient. He’s seen the way Harper slips in and out, helping, making Monty laugh. They’re good for each other. They’re just plain good. They don’t deserve all of this.

“Did you need something, or did you just want to come talk to the plants, too?” Monty’s skimming something off the top of one of the troughs.

“I—” He clears his throat, pulls himself back into the moment. “Murphy hasn’t been eating.”

Monty shrugs dismissively. “His loss.”

“Yeah. Well, I think it’s gone a little too far. He’s pretty fucked up. So if I could get him to eat, what would be the best…” He’s not quite sure how to form the question he’s trying to ask. _How do I fix someone against their will?_

“What, like the most calories per bite?” Monty thinks for a minute. “Well, putting aside the part where the rest of us need those calories, too, if we skip the soup and go straight to concentrated bars, that would probably help. As long as he’s still drinking water.”

Bellamy considers. “I mean, it’s not like we’ve been floating what he sends back. We’re all skinnier than when we started, but we’re doing okay. He’s the only one who can’t stand up.”

That does get Monty’s attention. “Like, actually can’t, or just being his melodramatic self?”

“Like passed out, bleeding from the mouth, bruised every-fucking-where…” He hesitates, then plows ahead, because he’ll be damned if any of their tiny, dysfunctional family is dying up here in space. “Monty, I’m not really sure what to do here.”

Monty sucks in a breath through his teeth. “You tell Emori?”

“No. Echo knows he’s sick, but not the details. I haven’t said anything to the others. Don’t want to stir up shit.”

“Well, I think that’s a spectacularly bad idea, but if I know one thing, it’s that I’m easily overruled.” He sounds weary, and resigned, and Bellamy feels a stab of guilt. He doesn’t have time to figure out what to do about it. Monty’s turning back to his plants: “Give me half an hour. Let me see what I can do.”

. . .

Murphy’s huddled under both blankets when he gets back. His glazed eyes register Bellamy, and it looks something like relief.

“I’ve got some food.”

The relief flashes to anger, but Bellamy cuts him off.

“You have to eat, Murphy. It’s not optional. Whatever’s going on isn’t going to get better by starving yourself, and Monty mentioned scurvy, so. Maybe you’re not so much space zombie as space pirate.”

No reply.

“Whatever. Algae it is. Mostly because it’s literally the only choice, but Monty also had a whole lecture on which subspecies have the highest concentrations of what. Again, we have what we have, but the point is, just eat the goddamn food.”

It seems like the kind of mic-drop statement you should walk out on, so Bellamy does. He stops in the hallway as soon as he’s out of sight. Slides down the wall. Hangs his head. Waits.

. . .

The sound of Murphy moaning brings him back. He fights the urge to rush back in. Waits. Counts to ten. A tangle of half-voiced curses, and the scrabble of feet on the floor, Murphy hurtling himself across the tiny bedroom to the toilet. Retching. Bellamy makes himself walk slow. Give Murphy some time. The bowl and the spoon aren’t were he left them, which means that Murphy had tried to eat, and that’s progress that he doesn’t want to fuck with.

Blood and bile on translucent skin, and he can’t stop the way _“John”_ falls off his lips. Murphy’s hyperventilating, panic and rage, and it occurs to Bellamy in a sudden, sickening rush that other than Emori, no one’s really called him “John” since his parents.

 _“Bell—”_ The way he chokes on Bellamy’s name makes him sound like Octavia did-does-will, long ago and in the future he’s clawing his way toward.

He stays in the doorway until Murphy’s done heaving. Pulls the washcloth off its hook. Runs it under lukewarm water. Hands it over.

It slips through Murphy’s fingers, tears in his eyes, breath fast and head tipped back, and the only response is _fuck it,_ is to get down on the floor as well, to rewet the cloth and wipe down Murphy’s face himself, forehead-cheeks-jawline-lips, and Murphy is shaking hard and heaving again, nothing but algae-green bile that Bellamy catches in the cloth, wipes from his chin, and Bellamy has seen a thousand rotting bodies in the battlefield in war but this is somehow, in its own way, too much.

He doesn’t pull him into his arms. Doesn’t call for Echo, or Emori, or Monty or Harper or Raven. He rinses the washcloth and hands it back, and this time Murphy’s grip holds, and Bellamy sits back against the wall outside of the tiny lav and lets Murphy pretend that he can handle this on his own.

. . .

Murphy’s stony-silent, curled on the bed under both blankets, eyes almost closed. Fighting sleep, or unconsciousness. Watching Bellamy. Angry and needing and hurt. Bellamy sets his face. Impassive. He’s in his shirtsleeves. He’d turned up the heat. It’s daylight outside. Sixteen sunrises for every turn of the Earth. Time was so slow, on the ground.

. . .

He sets out more meds, and leaves, and paces, and Murphy eats, and this time it stays down. Bellamy comes back to a half-empty bowl and Murphy sitting on the bed, feet on the floor, hand shaky at his stomach, color not quite right.

He nods, and goes back to his chair, and his book. He’s good at silence. Silence, he can do.

There’s no such thing as night, up here (sixteen sunsets for every turn of the Earth, the atmosphere a thin corona of flame), but the lights automatically dim. Bellamy doesn’t hit the override switch. He stands, and stretches, and lays down on the floor, and pillows his discarded long-sleeved shirt under his head. Tries to close his eyes.

. . .

The meds wear off in the middle of the night _(night: true night, back on the Ground; moonlight in the forest, stars up above)_ and Murphy’s back to shivering gasps, to coughing, to spitting blood. Bellamy holds out the bucket, the towel, the water, and doesn’t ask if he’s okay. The only possible answers are a lie or the truth, and neither one is going to help them now. The wave crests, and fades, and Murphy pants in the darkness. Bellamy had pulled a chair back to the bed. Straight on, this time. He leans forward. Elbows on his knees.

“Is—” Murphy choking, again, and regaining his breath. “Is Emori okay?”

Bellamy’s genuinely confused by that one. “Yeah, why wouldn’t she be? It’s not like you’ve been close enough to her to pass anything on.”

“Never know. Bad…” He’s breathless, straining, but he pushes through. “Bad shit happens when I get sick.”

Bellamy blinks, and draws a breath, because there it is. There all of it is. They’re all traumatized, how the fuck could they not be, but it started earlier for Murphy than for most. And at least Bellamy’s always had a singular mission _(Octavia, Octavia, Octavia, fate of the world be damned)._ Murphy’s just had fever and death and alcohol and death and the Ground and blood and death. And Emori. And then he went and fucked that up.

And that had fucked _him_ up, even more than before. He’d been gun-shy about eating after the whole coma thing, but got over it once their other supplies ran out. Since things fell apart with Emori, though, he’s been standing out in the middle of the tightrope, threatening to fall.

He’s inches away, in the darkness. Bellamy doesn’t reach out his hand. “You…” he keeps his voice low _(like gravel, the books say; like pebbles under turning wheels)._ “You trying to kill yourself?”

“No.”

Bellamy lets the silence carry his disbelief.

Murphy coughs, and grimaces, and wipes a trickle of new blood from the corner of his lips. “Not _not_ trying to kill myself, I guess.”

“And the bruises?”

His shoulders move in the smallest perceptible shrug. “Just trying to get it to stop.”

“Fucking hell, Murphy.” Whispered, this time.

Murphy rolls over, and they don’t speak, and Bellamy doesn’t read and Murphy doesn’t sleep, and his breath catches and he coughs until he chokes.

. . .

Bellamy debates putting himself in quarantine, but settles for new clothes and a hot-as-he-can-stand shower and vigorous scrubbing, instead. The ship is still dark and quiet. After the first few weeks, they’d decided that wanting to be on the same schedule outweighed the nervous impulse to sit up watching gravity and the ship’s computer sling them endlessly around in space. Lately, it means that Murphy can sneak around at night and not have to run into Emori. Bellamy doesn’t see anyone as he restocks, either, and he’s done fast. He stops, and considers, and goes back to the drawer with the scissors and the comb, Harper’s makeshift barbershop. He sticks the tools in his pocket and makes his way to the farm. Monty’s left some algae bars and a note with an outline of a plan. Bellamy looks it over, halves the numbers, and resolves to try to get Murphy to eat.

. . .

The bars seem to settle better than the soup, and Murphy eats enough to keep the meds down, and by the time the clocks claim noon _(noon: short shadows in the high burning sun, once in a true day, back on the Ground),_ Murphy’s able to shakily make his way back to the shower to wash off the blood and the sick. Bellamy strips the bed. Pulls new sheets from his bag. Lays the scissors and comb on top of the blanket, and waits. Murphy comes back, and eyes them, and shakes out his hair, and lets Bellamy get to work. Bellamy follows Harper’s lines, a hand flat on Murphy’s temple. Steadying. Feeling the fever underneath.

Silence for a while, then— “We’re gonna make it back.”

Murphy huffs a laugh. Disbelief and a refusal to hope.

He leaves it there. A million things unsaid.

Murphy’s sharp lines are re-emerging under the scissors and the comb. Bellamy knows that Murphy’s going to spiral back into shame and anger once the fever’s gone, furious at Bellamy for seeing him helpless, for cleaning up his blood. Furious at himself for pushing Emori away. Maybe the answer is the Ground. _(The Ground: gravel paths and ocean swells; true noon and true night, time moving slow; the home where their little fucked-up family was made.)_ Maybe the answer is that they’re all going to float, in the end, because no matter what their ancestors figured out, it wasn’t how to cheat death. For now, though, clean lines are a start; ragged love is a start; spoonfuls of soup that keep them alive are a start. He runs his fingers through Murphy’s hair where he’s kept it long on top and declares it done. Goes back out into the light: Raven cheering Emori’s success, Monty and Harper tending the farm, Echo at his side. Wills Murphy to join them there, when he’s ready. Bellamy can wait him out. All they’ve got it time.

. . .  
. . .

 

 


End file.
